Philip Hodgetts’ unique blend of business and production knowledge gives him insight into the current state of the industry, and a remarkably accurate look forward. Here he shares his thinking, and points to articles of interest from other sites, with context as to why they're interesting.

Yet again the threat of movie piracy – that is, unauthorized distribution – has had no observable affect on an industry with higher attendance and higher revenues. Please destroy my businesses like this!

Six million people watching one game’s game play. That’s a decent network-sized audience these days. That’s one game for one week. Admittedly a release week for the game.

Watching game play has become a huge audience, with very low production costs. While it’s not traditional production, the time spent watching gamers play video games, erodes the time available for other forms of entertainment, specifically films and television!

The illegal downloading of films has little effect on box office revenue, and industry estimates of its losses are exaggerated, a study has found.

However, the analysis also found that the national broadband network would encourage digital piracy.

We are still waiting for a peer reviewed study that shows any harm. Waiting, waiting, waiting. (Yes the MPAA/RIAA publish “results” but when you examine the details, their is no support for the MPAA/RIAA position. In other words they publish completely bogus results.)

A record average viewership via traditional TV Network and Cable distribution of 108.7 million (and many more who only saw part of the game) vs Internet distribution of a record 3 million, up from 2.1 million last year (and a total of 10 million who saw some of the game via Internet distribution, according to Yahoo News.

Depending on what you want you could spin this as “Internet Distribution increases 43% year on year”; or perhaps “Internet distribution was less than 3% of the traditional TV audience”. Both are factually true. The traditional method was down slightly (ranking as only the third most watched game) but very healthy.

Of course, this type of real-time, grand sporting event is exactly what the traditional TV and cable channels do very, very well and I believe will continue to do very well, long into the future. It may be all they’re left with, but – at least in my lifetime – I don’t expect an “Internet distribution only” Superbowl.

When you talk about movies, comedy, drama, and that type of TV fare, then Internet distribution isn’t quite so far “out there”